


The Green and the Blue

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Paranoia, Unsettling, some lovely autumnal imagery tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 14:48:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12684054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: Thread haunts her. That's about the only thing she's sure of.





	The Green and the Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. So this is not the next chapter of the Beatles fic which will probably never happen. I am sorry. But this is all my writer's block afflicted brain could come up with after literal months and I'm pretty pleased with it... I know it's original work and all but I would be really happy if someone read and reviewed this. It would make my week. Thank you and hope you enjoy!

By our bus stop there is a bush, or a tree, which climbs up behind the fence around the waterworks, poking its stubby branches between the interlocking metal. I have never been able to identify the tree or bush, but I have always been certain that the elongated red berries spewing out of the end of each twig were deadly. No one ever told me so; it is simply a feeling I have got from the whole ensemble. The branches reach out as though through prison bars, begging to feed one unsuspecting mortal with their poison-soaked treats, and that red colour - muddy red like dried blood - could only mean death.

It was a clear, high-pressure day in October when I first saw the coil of thread. The sun was still rising, and where the horizon was low you could see the watery gradient of blue going to the palest of pinks, streaked with stretched clouds. The autumn dawn lit my suburban landscape up like '70s celluloid. Trees were rich red-tinted green; brick houses shone between knife-cut shadows. I remember the morning, and I remember the thread from later in the day, but nothing else: I recount them both here in the hope that put together, some sense may be made of the whole situation.

So: later in the day, I saw the coil of thread for the first time.

Even that first time, there was something about it which stuck to me, turning around in the back of my head. I saw it on the floor of a science lab, and knew instantly why it was there. One or two weeks ago there had been an experiment involving embroidery thread, examining the bleaching effects of various chemicals. The children had been focused, as I recalled, when I wheeled in a trolley bearing the test tubes, acids and red thread. The teacher had not had to raise her voice once, and perhaps I imagined it, but it seemed that one girl quietly thanked me as I left the room. And now, one piece of that experiment was left over, twisted in on itself on the sterile ground, only it was not red, but blue and green. I frowned at it, as if it were a child in the restricted areas of the school. I thought little of it though, and my day continued - now faded from my memory entirely, leaving only that thread, and that lovely dawn.

Sometime that week, or perhaps later, I was called into the Headmistress' office. "I'm sure you know why I've called you here," she said, just as I was closing the door behind me. Her face was uncomfortable to look at close up, and when she said my name it sent a jolt through me, as I had been sure she did not know it. Teachers were the people who got called into the office; I was not a teacher. "Quite frankly," she continued, "I'm not sure why you thought you'd get away with it."

"With what, Ma'am?"

"So you _still_ believe you got away with it. Well, sorry to tell you this, but _two_ of the students in Form B gave separate eye-witness accounts, and it's your word against theirs."

The situation did not feel real, to my mind. Every day was so uniform, a sequence of discrete yet identical events with shifting students and lab requirements, and all that stood out to me was that blue-green thread, like the gash in a vinyl record. Children testified against me? Did the children even know my name, or that I existed beyond that little side-room? "Is this about the thread?" was all I could offer.

Perhaps the words were too quiet for the Headmistress to register. She sighed and spoke while scanning a document on the desk with her eyes. "No matter in the end, I suppose. No harm done, as they say. You've been a hardworking employee - don't think I don't notice good work when I see it, now! - and I'm willing to treat this as a blip of sorts. It won't go on the record, as long as I can have your assurance that it will not happen again. Good?"

"Good," I stammered.

"Wonderful." She offered me a toffee from a spherical container, and indicated for me to leave. The thread was lying on the threshold, caught under the door. Instinctively, I stooped down to pick it up, but she called after me. "I'm busy now, please leave." I snapped up and hastened out of the room, leaving the thread still there. The experience left me feeling hollowed. It reminded me of incidents which I had preferred to leave buried.

Perhaps I ought to interject here, to point out that none of this could really be called recent. In fact, the last time I could say for certain who I was and where I came from was far back in my childhood.

I was nine, maybe ten years old, making the arduous walk home from school on a mid-autumn darkening day. My walk sloped down concrete hills and through slick leaf-coatings, and I was tired from the day's learning, my little rucksack weighing me down. When I finally reached my home, I expected my father to open the door to let me in as always, but this time it was someone different.

I did not at first notice his face, but his clothing: a fluffy blue and green striped jumper, over a pair of baggy jeans. The sight drew my attention, because my father was accustomed to warm earthy colours, which had blended seamlessly with the autumnal surroundings, and these cool colours seemed disharmonious. I looked up at his face, to see someone I did not recognise. It was a middle-aged, fleshy face, and it stretched into a smile as it looked into my eyes, the smile of one who was acquainted with the person he was looking at. At nine years old, I did not take my terrible facial recognition to mean anything but an inconvenience, and I surmised with a little embarrassment that this man must be a friend of the family, one who had visited before, or perhaps attended a party. He said my name, and the words "Welcome home!" I smiled back at him, doing my best to act as though I remembered him, because I could not face the awkwardness of asking him who he was. On stepping into the house, I looked around to see if my father was there, perhaps to explain, but father was nowhere to be found.

The stranger asked me about my day, and happily told me about his; our conversation ran smoothly, more so than usual for people I was unfamiliar with, and it was only when mother returned from work that I realised with a jolt that father had never shown up.

We ate dinner together. The stranger had prepared it for us: "thank you, dear," mother said, looking at him with a familiar expression of comfortable tranquillity. Father never walked through the front door with an explanation, and the stranger in the fluffy jumper retired to bed with my mother at ten-thirty. I have not seen my father since, nor heard a word about him.

Perhaps I should have questioned it. Perhaps that would have done some good - only, I knew it would not. They - my mother and my new father - would have only been concerned at my own mental health, horrified to think that their child could completely forget her own father, and I would have had no power to make my understanding clear. It was better, smoother, easier to adjust to the new way of things: I addressed the stranger as "Father", abided by his rules, and came in time to view him as a parent, if not _the_ parent. The man whose silhouette had said _goodnight_ to me, from the white light in my doorway for nine years - him I mourned silently, in my own time, until eventually I moved on.

Alongside all this, like the glaring woollen colours on my new father's jumper, there was piercing doubt which never truly left me alone. No one in the neighbourhood gave any suggestion that there had ever been a different person living in my house, my schoolteachers seemed to recall him, and mother treated him with even more open physical affection than she had father, kissing his temples and embracing him from behind in the mornings before he would head off to wherever it was that Father-changelings went to work. With all this in mind, who was to say that _I_ was not the mistaken one, and that this stranger - whose name, I should perhaps have mentioned, was Steven - had in fact always lived with me? He fitted the house like a well-worn article of clothing, him and his un-warm colour palettes for shirts, his just-cleaned pink for face, and his brown for eyes, tender and paternal.

I left the thread in the headmistress' doorway. I was unable to touch it; I would always be unable, and it would always slink away.

After that point, it was small things. There was a clog in my sink; I called the plumber to find that the number I had noted down in my address book was in fact the number of a local delicatessen. "I'm so sorry," I said, baffled at the heavy breath on the other end of the line, on which I could almost smell the bloody meats. "Wrong number." On another day, I found that I had prepared the same experiment four times in one day, and apparently for the same people - I could have sworn that I had heard one girl cry out to the teacher each time that Jerry had broken the Bunsen burner, but could that not be a common occurrence? More than once, I would be certain that it was a Thursday or a Friday, only to have my hopes dashed at some point near 4:00 and find out that it was only Tuesday. Small things. The headmistress' words haunted me, and I applied them each time: a blip of sorts. The thread, too, pursued me, but only in the corner of my eye, ghostly as a spider's leg in my peripheral vision when my hands shuddered to a halt, as they measured out three-hundred-ml of hydrochloric acid for the fourth time.

Sometimes it was the colours which got to me. Sometimes it was more the shortness: for what could such a small piece of thread be used? And often, although not always, when I recalled or saw again the coil of thread, I would remember the particular loveliness of that first day. As the weeks slipped by, unblipped and unaltered in their inexorable passage, that golden autumn faded with them. It occurred to me on a dull November morning of pre-dawn purples and indigos and greys that we had not had golden autumn since that one day, that I might never experience such clarity again. I did try to talk about it, but each time the problem would slip away, elusive as everything else seemed to be. "Hello, darling?" My father greeted me, all fleshy smiles from his house in Nottingham which I could not see over the phone.

"Hello, Steven," I said.

" _S_ _teven?_ I thought I was Dad to you."

"Are you really?"

"Oh, dearest. Let's not start that now."

"Start what? What am I starting?" I dabbed at the corners of my eyes, curled up in the squashed little sofa, in which I was spending more and more of my evenings, motionless and thoughtless. There were no tears left to dry, although the urge to cry had not quite gone away. It was a frustrating sensation; I heard my father-changeling sigh, and the sound was broken and distorted. A storm was raging over England. Perhaps that interfered with the line. Perhaps all my communications would be cut; I would be alone and isolated and safe from all those uncertainties.

"Never mind," he said, and the relief was warm like one of his fluffy jumpers, "That doesn't matter. You hardly call anymore! How have things been, then?"

"They've been sublime," I whispered to him, letting myself smile.

"Ah," he said my name with affection that sounded real, well-worn, and of course it did, he had been my father at least since I was nine years old, " _Sublime._ You always were so eloquent."

And then, the problem was gone, fluttered on invisible wings out of the window. What was the problem, after all? I didn't know anything, anymore.

I had all but got used to living my life the way an old electrical appliance does, adjusting to the little malfunctions and accepting them as a part of my aging mind and body, but I simply could not explain away what happened in mid-December. I entered my apartment, shaking off the snow in my cap, watching it melt on the floor, and my flat-mate gave me a wave from the sofa, which stopped me in my tracks, because I did not have a flat-mate.

"What's up?" she said, with a frown that was somehow also a smile. "Looks cold out."

"Who are you? What are you doing in my house?"

" _Very_ funny. I'm helping you pay rent, remember?" She was young, with the tired and smooth-skinned look of a student, and she was reading a book, something about economics. It felt as though a weed which had been winding around my internal organs suddenly let its presence be known with a crushing squeeze. "Nice day at school?"

I pushed back against the tide, desperate to resist. "No. No, I don't know you. I've never met you before in my..." She turned her head to the side to give me a quizzical look, revealing her tied-back hair; wound up with the mousy pale brown strands was an intertwining of green and blue threads. "Oh," I said. Of course.

" _Anyway,_ " she said, wrapping a frond of hair around her index finger, "I was wondering what to get you for Christmas this year. You're so inscrutable; I never have any idea what you want." What I wanted was to seize those frayed threads out of her head, grab them while I could see them and before they could disperse away like wine floating through a space-ship, but they were braided into her hair, soldered to her scalp and I could not touch them.

"I don't celebrate Christmas," I said. "Never have." Some years the thought had occurred to me to go up to Nottingham and spend the weekend with mother and father. Most years nothing occurred to me at all, and in my world the day passed like any other.

She made another frown-smile. "But we've celebrated Christmases _together._ You bought me chocolate-covered ginger biscuits."

"No," I said, shaking the rest of the snow out of my coat with more vehemence than was necessary. "I spend Christmas _alone_."

The word reverberated around the cramped apartment, ricocheted against the walls, and came back to me as a lie. As the girl smiled at me, something like triumph in her face, my legs weakened and I could no longer resist. "Well, that's just stupid," she said. " _Nobody_ spends Christmas alone."

_Precisely,_ I wanted to say. There was no point. But when she turned her face down again to read her book, I could still see the sea-coloured flash in her hair: they had failed to disappear.

After that point, surprisingly, things became easier, or they were easier for a time. Now that I could see the threads and know their whereabouts, they no longer followed me around and winked out of existence when I turned my head towards them. Little things continued to change - "I could have _sworn_ this jacket was black when I last wore it" - but I adjusted.

When my flatmate who had always been my flatmate began to address me as "Mum", things became harder to accept. She was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, some feet away from me when she did it, and she did it while looking down at her phone, so she did not see the look of horror on my face. I did not know what I was doing until my hands had already grabbed her wrists, jerking the phone out of her grasp and onto the floor. She let out some cry of surprise and indignation.

"The threads," I cried, "Give them to me. Give them to me now!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Your - your hair - the threads! The green and blue threads, give them to me quickly!"

The girl, whose name was Julie, my mother's name, brought a shaking hand to the back of her head, and ran her fingers through the braided strands. "Do you mean my ribbons? Is that..." With the nervous tenderness of one handling a distressed animal, she showed me the plaits, unwound them, and pulled out two shining satin ribbons, one blue and one green. She pressed them into my hand; they were metallic in their sheen, smooth to the touch, and their colours were soothing to the eye. I ran my thumb and forefinger up and down them, remembering the frayed ends of the threads, their twisted marble-dye colours, and their terrible and useless shortness. "Mum, what's gotten into you?" She said. "Why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying," I said.

"You're scaring me, Mum." There was not a trace of insincerity in her words; she too sounded close to tears. I wiped my face, the ribbons still clenched in my fist. I handed them back to her.

"It's all right," I whispered to her. "I'm all right now, dear."

The truth is, that it is a poor thing to lose one's own existence, strand by strand. They say that no "I have," I said eventually to the man at the bus stop with the greyscale checked scarf whom I had seen on every working day since first taking the 023 bus but with whom I had never exchanged words, "Absolutely nothing."

"... Great," he said. He was Irish. Or was he? Was that an Irish accent, or a Highland Scots lilt?

"These berries," I said, indicating the tree-bush, "Are poisonous." I caressed the black thorny twiglets. I stroked the smooth exterior of one of the berries, admired its matt colours. The school would break up for the Christmas holiday today; there were no experiments to assist, but I was not a lab assistant anymore. I never had been, they assured me, when I questioned the duster they'd put in my hands.

"They are? Sure." He thought I was mad, presumably. Perhaps I was, perhaps I am. I'm just telling you how it was, what it was like for me to lose all understanding in a flurry of split ends, and I tell you every detail, in the hope that some sense may finally, at long last, at some perfect peaceful conclusion, be made of the whole situation. "Hey..."

"Don't worry," I smiled at him, after sucking the first good little fruit from my fingers and starting to chew. It spurted a sharp-tasting juice across my tongue. It filled my mouth like jam. "I'm not entirely certain." December greyed everything, even the wide green park. I swallowed the tight flesh of the berry just as I pulled another from its stalk, and I watched the bare trees in the field around the waterworks. It was a chill dawn, but I was warmed by the magnetic attraction between the crows and the outstretched branches. To me, they looked like wayward children running back to a mother's embrace, like the link between two black-ink words on a page, like the unhurried ease of faith.


End file.
